At: https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4334017
I am continuing the discussion of the use of Leo in Axiom with the developer of Leo, Edward Ream on the Leo SourceForge forum. Ed is reluctant to participate directly in this email list. He would prefer to work one-on-one to develop some ideas about how best to use Leo with noweb and Axiom. But I also want to pass some of this discussion along here since you may not find it especially convenient or find sufficient motivation to participate directly in the Leo forum where this is being discussed. If anyone has any objection to this arrangement, please let me know. ------------ RE: Leo, LP and Axiom By: Bill Page (billpage) - 2007-05-28 20:09 Edward, thank you for continuing this thread on Leo and Axiom. Aside: Has anyone ever expressed to you an opinion that interacting this way via a web forum is rather awkward? It seems archaic to me compared to the email lists where I interact with all of the other projects. How did Leo end up doing things this way? You said: "Discussion of Leo by those who don't use it is distasteful." You wrote "by" so I presume that you mean that you find what people say about Leo who don't really know anything about Leo distasteful? Well I can certainly understand that point of view after reading through almost all of the Leo thread on slashdot! But I do not have very high expectations for such wide open forums. Of course discussing Leo *with* people who don't use it is a normal part of promoting the idea. I think very few ideas actually sell themselves. "There are so many misconceptions about Leo that I despair of knowing where to begin." I think the obvious place to begin is always with examples. But I must admit that I was a little taken-a-back by the comment by Ralf Hemmecke (an Axiom developer whom I otherwise greatly respect) that he did not think that 'LeoPy.leo' qualified as a literate program at all. I think he was looking for something "pretty" and "publishable quality" (not his words) such as the LaTeX that one might see as output from Knuth's web or from noweb, but did not find it. Of course there is a section of the Leo documentation that specifically addresses this in reference to "weave", but I am sure that he did not find that convincing. "The attitude on the list seems to be that using traditional LP is some kind of major advance in programming." Well, the Axiom developers are acutely aware that no other computer algebra project has ever committed all of it's source code to a literate format. This is also underlined by the fact that a large part of Axiom is actually written in Lisp and the Lisp community has been one of the most resistant to the idea of literate programming from the very beginning. If there is any really argument to be made here, then it is that traditional LP would be or should be a major advance over the way computer algebra systems have been built and tested in the past. I have not heard any serious attempts on the Axiom developer list to apply this assessment to programming in general. The problems that LP is supposed to solve in Axiom arises from Axiom's long history and origin as a very active research project. A lot of the code in Axiom is over 30 years old and most of it was never documented properly. Tim Daly - a lead Axiom developer - was one of the people involved in programming Axiom during these early days and it is at least in part his experience of revisiting now code that he wrote then, and realizaton that if only some additional effort had been placed on documenting the original code *during* it's development, then we would not be in the situation we are today with Axiom. Another thing that makes the application of LP to Axiom a little unique is that a large part of the Axiom code (the Axiom library) is actually meant to directly encode concepts and theorems of mathematics. Mathematicians are quite used to communicating new algorithms and proving new theories in the form of research papers. It is the desire of the Axiom developers that the approach to LP used in Axiom should directly support this mode of documentation of Axiom code. "Bill, I suggest that you abandon, at least temporarily, the effort to convert your colleagues to Leo." I have no idea if or when one or more of the other Axiom developers will take an active interest in Leo however I would like to reserve the right to continue this discussion in parallel on the Axiom developer email list even without your direct participation and in spite of an apparent disinterest on the part of other Axiom developers. The main reason for this is that I would like to include a record of these discussions in the Axiom email archives. I have come to rely on these archives as the main means of help to maintain some long term continuity in my input to the Axiom project. "Instead, I would be happy to help make Leo a friendlier host (for you). This will involve some discussion about the best work flow for using noweb. There are several alternatives that we can discuss at leisure." This approach is acceptable to me. I am very interested on your views about how best to use noweb in conjunction with Leo. I don't have much "leisure" these days :-) but I would like to set as an objective the actual creation of a trial Leo-based source repository for Axiom. Of course this might take some time if I cannot attract anyone else from the Axiom project to help. In any case, could you please outline how you would like to go about this? For instance, do you see us as continuing to interact via this forum? Do you think it would it be useful to setup a new branch of the Axiom repository to support and share this work? Do you anticipate that there will be modifications to Leo as well as to the structure of the Axiom source code? If so, should these changes be maintained in a separate branch of Leo development? Thanks again for offering to work with me on using Leo with Axiom. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
